KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS Reading the casebook as a single argument It would be a mistake to read these many cases as many separate ideas. They are one idea, photographed from dozens of angles. Every case, however different its setting, has the same internal structure: a citizen or institution performs a verified action; a loop of recognition, reward, rivalry, and patronage closes around it, and a result follows that is larger and more durable than the action alone would have produced. The places change, a fishmarket corner in Vypin, a ghat road above Munnar, a recharge pit in Adoor, a relief camp in Wayanad, and the behaviour at the top changes, but the machine underneath is recognisably the same in all of them. That sameness is the casebook’s entire purpose. A framework can assert that it is reusable; a casebook demonstrates it, by running the same mechanism past the reader so many times, in so many guises, that the reusability stops being a claim and becomes something the reader has seen with their own eyes. By the twentieth case the structure is familiar; by the fiftieth it is automatic; by the last the reader can predict the shape of a case before reading it, which is exactly the intended effect. The repetition is not padding. It is the argument, made the only way an argument about generality can honestly be made, which is by instance after instance until the pattern is undeniable. 237